


before i start dreaming

by ghostmachine



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-15 21:29:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12329229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostmachine/pseuds/ghostmachine
Summary: They’re both coping, moving slowly through the days and helping each other peel away the film of horror and trauma that has fallen over the past months. In a slow shuffle they heal each other, promises pressed against cheeks on cold mornings, but the nights are different.Post-season 3. Laura and Carmilla attempt to put the pieces back together, but nightmares unravel them both.





	before i start dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic in a few years, immediately following a full Carmilla rewatch. 
> 
> Title taken from the song of the same name by Anchor & Braille.

They’re both coping, moving slowly through the days and helping each other peel away the film of horror and trauma that has fallen over the past months. In a slow shuffle they heal each other, promises pressed against cheeks on cold mornings, but the nights are different. Like a black cloth they settle, and it’s never sure which of them will wake, if Carmilla or Laura will be ripped from their own repeating nightmare first. 

On any given night the air is calm and quiet in the country, the window open to Sherman’s backyard. Carmilla knows Laura feels safe nestled in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by comic con posters and shelves full of fantasy novels, and Carmilla feels safe beside her. But there are certain things that are hard to shake, easy to haunt the subconscious, and their fallout ending at the gates of hell is only the tip of the iceberg. 

Most nights it’s Laura’s voice echoing through the halls, waking her father, screaming and pleading for her own heart back. The first few times it had happened Sherman had run into their makeshift sanctuary with some form of homemade weapon, hell bent on protecting his daughter from phantoms both real and imagined. Eventually Carmilla had pulled him aside, fed him some white lie about Laura’s embarrassment, when in truth the realities of what happened in the pit were still unspoken in the daylight of Sherman’s homestead. Carmilla knew that Laura would likely skate over the events of that fateful early morning with her father forever, and so she took it upon herself to absorb as much of Laura’s pain as she could. 

But what Carmilla could barely admit to herself was that the accumulated wounds of 300 years of life were finally catching up, that her dreams were a loop of Laura in her mother’s clutches, Laura’s heart beating alive in her mother’s fist, Laura lying dead in her arms. And each night the dreams wound their way to an unfathomable pool of blood, an ocean of memory and panic and drowning. On more occasions than she would like to admit, it was Laura shaking her awake, Laura with comforting words and touches and lips soft and sure. 

And on those nights Laura would take her hand, guide it to her chest to feel the place where her heart was beating. Carmilla would be still, holding the breath she had only just acquired, drowning out the pumping of her own renewed heart, and press her head to the hollow of Laura’s neck. Laura, drifting in and out of consciousness, would whisper reassurances that served as a measure of their shared humanity. 

“It’s alright, Carm.”

“We made it.”

“I’m still here.”

“I always will be.”

A hand fisted in her hair, Carmilla would allow her own breath to return, shallow and staccato, her eyes fixed on the silhouette next to her, the one moving in a timed rhythm. And, slowly but surely, Carmilla’s eyes would grow heavy, her mind pulled away from Laura like a wave from the shore, but moving quietly into a sleep undisturbed and miraculous.


End file.
